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One of the highlights of my life was being in South Africa when apartheid breathed its final breath and Nelson Mandela was elected president. I didn’t think it could get any better until I had an opportunity to have breakfast with President Mandela at Blair House in Washington, DC, a few months later.

I keep this autographed place card to remind me how blessed I’ve been. Keeping Madiba, his family and all of those fighting for freedom in my prayers.

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Given that this is primarily a blog bout my father, you would think I would have something profound to post on the day we celebrate, well, fathers. But, for reasons already dealt with in this blog, I don’t have a store of rich memories of my dad.

Many of my memories of him are filtered through my mother: “Don’t let your Daddy see that bikini I just bought you.” “Your Daddy told me to come down here and tell that boy to go home.” “Your Daddy would be so proud of you.”

My daughter, Zuri Adele, and her father, Darryl Alladice, in 1995

I remember being very young, maybe five or six and calling my mother an “old hag.” She thought I’d called her an “old bag,” which I kind of liked better. My mother told me to stand outside and wait until my father came home — they didn’t call it “time out” back then. Whatever punishment was meted out for my rude mouth, I’m sure my father did not administer it. He never did. I’m sure he was pretty typical of the dad of the 50s and 60s. The strong, silent breadwinner and hands-off parent.

I’m glad I have his columns to explore. Through them I’m finding that Ebenezer and I are more like soul mates than I would ever have imagined. But when he was writing for the New York Age, he wasn’t a father. If he had a relationship with his own father, it’s not at all evident. I have no idea what he thought of fatherhood, in the abstract or the concrete.

We’re lucky to live in an age when men, including the president of the United States, talk openly about fatherhood.

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After watching Serena Williams give the Best Performance by a Women’s Tennis Player in the 2013 French Open, I didn’t think the weekend could get any better. But since I blogged about Cicely Tyson’s performance in “The Trip to Bountiful” a few weeks ago, I thought I should follow up.

What a night at the Tony Awards.

Cicely Tyson: Best Performance by an Actress in a Play (“The Trip to Bountiful”)
Patina Miller: Best Performance by an Actress in a Musical (“Pippin”)
Billy Porter: Best Performance by an Actor in a Musical (“Kinky Boots”)
Courtney Vance, Best Performance by a Featured Actor in a Play (“Lucky Guy”)

I hope I can remember where I put my keys when I’m her age, I thought as I watched Cicely Tyson perform the other night. Forget remembering all of my lines in a Broadway play.

Tyson is the central character in The Trip to Bountiful, which is currently playing at the Stephen Sondheim Theatre. It’s not that I’m surprised that Tyson is amazing. I’m just appreciative of her longevity, her beauty and her tenacity.

Wikipedia has Tyson born in December of 1933, which would make her 79. The New York Times puts her at 88.

I admit, there were times when, even with a few tweaks to the set, (There’s a sign in the bus station that points to a “Whites Only” waiting room.) I was hyper-aware of the fact that a black family’s experience in Jim Crow Texas might have been a little different from the one playing out on the stage.

According to the Times, it was Hallie Foote, daughter of playwright Horton Foote, who wanted to do the play with an African American cast. She’d long envisioned Tyson in the role of Carrie Watts. For her part, Tyson said she’d always wanted to do the play. Human longing for home is universal, she said

“They just took down the house I lived in at 311 East 102nd Street,” she told the Times. “I used to walk by and feel like I could still see my mother in the window.”

Tyson’s parents, like my father, whose birthday would be today, immigrated from the West Indies and settled in Harlem. To say that her mother did not support her choice of career would be an understatement.

“My mother didn’t talk to me for two years,” Tyson said in an interview on CBS’ Sunday Morning.

But Tyson persisted, and she was judicious about the roles she accepted. She refused to take parts that did “nothing to enhance the race itself or women.”

Tyson won two Emmy Awards for her role in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman — one for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Miniseries and a special honor for Actress of the Year. She also got Oscar and Golden Globe nominations for her performance in Sounder.

Now she’s nominated for a Tony Award for Bountiful.

Whatever window her mother is watching from, I’m sure she is proud.

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My father walked off a boat in 1923 and checked in at Ellis Island. He was a black man. His path to citizenship couldn’t have been easy. But he wasn’t forced to hide in the shadows, worrying that he might be deported to Barbados. He was able to pursue his dream and become an American journalist.

Alejandro Morales, Ola Kaso, Jose Patino and Erika Andiola have not enjoyed that privilege. They came with their families as children to the United States, the only country they know as home. They are the embodiment of the American Dream. They’ve been good citizens, great family members and excellent students. Yet their dreams have been deferred by an America that refuses to fully embrace them.

Morales, Kaso, Patino and Andiola are the subjects of a new documentary The Dream is Now, which chronicles these young people’s efforts to earn their citizenship.

Morales has wanted to be a Marine since eighth grade, but he can’t without a Social Security number.

Patino, who graduated from Arizona State University with a degree in mechanical engineering, works low-skilled construction jobs because he can’t get hired as an engineer.

Kaso wants to become an oncologist and was accepted to the University of Michigan, but her future was put on hold while her family’s status was reviewed. During a routine meeting with immigration officials, she was handcuffed to a chair in a basement hallway of a detention center for several hours.
Andiola, who has met with everybody from Sen. John McCain to White House adviser Valerie Jarrett as an advocate for the Dream Act, was granted permission to work, but her mother was put on a bus headed for Mexico — in chains.

The film is part of a movement of the same name launched by Laurene Powell Jobs and her organization, the Emerson Collective. Produced by award-winning filmmaker Davis Guggenheim, The Dream is Now, also places their struggles in an historical context. It’s the next battle in the civil rights movement.

Recently, the Associated Press changed its stylebook to include this proviso: “Except in direct quotes essential to the story, use illegal only to refer to an action, not a person: illegal immigration, but not illegal immigrant.”

I appreciate the spirit of the AP’s decision. Words have power, and that’s the point. But what I would appreciate even more is for America to stop criminalizing our children.

And yes, Morales, Kaso, Patino and Andiola and other “Dreamers” are our children.
Watch the film. Join their movement.

On Friday, Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley signed legislation that paves the way for posthumous pardons of the Scottsboro Boys, nine black teenagers falsely accused in 1931 of raping two white women. For nearly a decade, my father used his New York Age column to remind his readers of what he called a travesty of justice.

“We cannot take back what happened. But we can make it right moving forward. That’s why I’m signing this legislation,” Bentley said on Friday. “It’s important to clear the names of the Scottsboro Boys.”

Ebenezer would say it’s about time.

I’m glad it didn’t take 8more than 80 years to clear the young men who served 7 – 13 years for the rape of Trisha Meili, better known as the Central Park jogger. Still, these young men have not been afforded the full measure of justice.

On April 19, 1989, Meili was brutally raped and beaten nearly to death in the park by Matias Reyes, a serial rapist and murderer.

It just happened to be on a night when a couple of dozen teenagers ran through the park, some assaulting, robbing and harassing people.

Ken Burns chronicles the case in his latest documentary, The Central Park Five, which premiered on PBS last week. . In the film, Raymond Santana, Kevin Richardson, Antron McCray, Yusef Salaam and Kharey Wise admit that they were in the park that night and witnessed some bad behavior. But none of them knew anything about a rape until New York City police, determined to wrap up the case, force fed them details and manipulated them into confessing.

The documentary is heartbreaking. Police ignored or neglected the fact that there was no physical evidence that implicated any of the boys. They ignored the fact that the boys’ “confessions” were not only inconsistent with the facts that law enforcement knew, but also with each others stories. One of the most heartbreaking scenes is watching the prosecutor take a videotaped confession from Wise, the oldest of the five, who was 16. She read him his Miranda rights, told him he had a right to a lawyer, a right to remain silent. But Wise was exhausted after hours and hours of intimidation, interrogation and promises that he would soon be allowed to go home, tells a made-up story implicating himself and his acquaintances.

“If this had happened in 1901, they would have been lynched, perhaps castrated and their bodies burned and that would have been the end of it,” Rev. Calvin Butts, pastor of Abyssinian Baptist Church, said in the documentary.

“But this was New York City, 1989, , said LynNell Hancock, now a journalism professor at Columbia University. “It was not Jim Crow South, and yet the same words are being used with the same damaging results.”

I remember tearing up when I picked up the New York Times in 2002 and read that the whole thing had indeed been a lie. Reyes, who by then was in prison for other crimes, confessed to the rape of Meile. His DNA was in the police files all along. It was the only DNA on Meile’s belongings. The worst part: While officials were railroading the boys, Reyes continued to rape and murder women.

With his confession, the convictions of the five were vacated by a New York State Supreme Court judge. The City of New York, however, has refused to admit any wrongdoing. A civil suit filed on behalf of the young men in 2003 has yet to be resolved.

No amount of money will give these men back their youth, bu eas Alabama Gov. Bentley said, New York City cannot “take back what happened,” but the city can and should make it right.

Yet their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren are witnessing it under sunny skies in DC and on the airwaves across the nation.

That we are celebrating Inauguration Day on the day we celebrate King’s life, reminds us of the continuum of progress.

When civil rights leader Myrlie Evers-Williams came up to the podium to give the inaugural invocation, I was reminded of the assassination of her husband, Medgar. In 1963, in my lifetime, it was heresy in many quarters to suggest that a black person should exercise one vote, much less amass enough votes to be elected to the highest office of the land.

When I see Michelle, Malia and Sasha Obama, and Marian Robinson in all their beauty and elegance, I can’t help but think about my Essence magazine days, when mainstream advertisers didn’t want to associate their products with black women.

When President Obama included the Stonewall Riots in the same breath as Seneca Falls and Selma, it indicated how far he and the nation have come on the issue of gay rights.

When this year’s inaugural laureate, Richard Blanco, the son of Cuban exiles, offered his poem “One Today,” I thought of those like my father, born in other countries, who believed so much in America’s promise even as they were keenly aware of its shortcomings.

“Through it all, we have never relinquished our skepticism of central authority, nor have we succumbed to the fiction that all society’s ills can be cured through government alone. Our celebration of initiative and enterprise; our insistence on hard work and personal responsibility, are constants in our character.

But we have always understood that when times change, so must we; that fidelity to our founding principles requires new responses to new challenges; that preserving our individual freedoms ultimately requires collective action . . .

You and I, as citizens, have the obligation to shape the debates of our time – not only with the votes we cast, but with the voices we lift in defense of our most ancient values and enduring ideals.

Let each of us now embrace, with solemn duty and awesome joy, what is our lasting birthright. With common effort and common purpose, with passion and dedication, let us answer the call of history, and carry into an uncertain future that precious light of freedom.”

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